“’Now, I thought I was through, but one
more idea has occurred to me. By selling our
goods at strictly one price I can figure exactly how
much money I am making on a given volume of business.
Before, this matter of “cuts” made it
a varying, uncertain amount; in future there will
be certainty as to the amount of profits. And
another thing, so sure as I live, if all of you go
out and make the same increase that the one who stood
out against all of us has made, our business will
thrive so that we can afford to sell goods cheaper
still. Until to-night I never knew why it was
that he took hold of what seemed to me a big business
in his predecessor’s territory and doubled it
the second year. His success was the triumph
of common honesty, and we all shall try his plan,
for honesty is right, and nothing beats the right.’
“When the vote was taken the second time, every
man at the table stood up.”
CANCELED ORDERS.
“Do I like cancellations? Well, I guess
not!” said a furnishing goods friend, straightening
up a little and lighting his cigar as a group of us
sat around the radiator after supper one night in the
Hoffman House. “I’ll tell you, boys,
I’d rather keep company with a hobo, than with
a merchant who will place an order and then cancel
it without just cause. I can stand it all right
if I call on a man for a quarter of a century and
don’t sell him a sou, but when I once make a
sale, I want it to stick. This selling business
isn’t such a snap as most of our employers think.
It takes a whole lot of hard knocking; the easy push-over
days are all over. When a man lands a good order
now it makes the blood rush all over his veins; and
when an order it cut out it is like getting separated
from a wisdom tooth. Of course you can’t
blame a Kansas merchant for going back on his orders
in a grasshopper year; but it is the fellow who has
half a notion of canceling when he buys and afterwards
really does cancel, that I carry a club for.
“Usually a fellow who does this sort of funny
work comes to grief. I know I once had the satisfaction
of playing even with a smart buyer who canceled on
me.
“I was down in California. I was put onto
a fellow named Johnson up in Humboldt County, who
wanted some plunder in my line—the boys,
you know, are pretty good to each other in tipping
a good chance off to one another. I couldn’t
very well run up to the place—it was a two-day
town—so I wrote Johnson to meet me at ’Frisco
at my expense. He came down, bought his bill
all right, and I paid him his expense. Luckily,
I put a clothing man on and we ‘divied’
the expense. We treated that fellow white as
chalk; we gave him a good time—took him
to the show and put before him a good spread.
